Social Media Platform Feature – ShareChat

ShareChat is the fastest growing Indian social network platform available in Indian languages. It’s a “user-generated content”(UGC) platform that is empowering the first time internet users to embrace social media in their own language.

Whom do we cater to?

Our primary focus is to develop a comfortable and intuitive social platform for the vernacular first internet users. High growth pattern of new internet users has been observed in Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities in the last few year. Evidently, more than 80% of our user base comes from such cities all over the country.

What do we offer to our consumers?

A typical user on ShareChat can make their digital profile, create posts, connect with other users, and engage on other user’s posts by sharing, liking or commenting. Our users can consume the latest trends of internet and social media on ShareChat without any language barrier. Our entire app structure, user experience and nomenclature is designed to help a new internet user in understanding a complex social networking platform.

What motivated us to start up?

Before coming up with the idea ShareChat, we worked on 14 different products, all in the direction of constructing the future of Indian internet. Our last product before ShareChat was a discussion based mobile application where people can discuss and debate anything they like. We noticed a demand of sharing multimedia content, but traditional social networks were not preferred due to their complexity. People dominantly user personal messaging platforms like Whatsapp to share content. It was clear that there was a need of an open sharing platform which is easy to use and understand. Then ShareChat was built keeping in mind someone who only understand their mother tongue should be able to use the platform up to its full potential

What’s in a name?

Generally, while naming a product, it is advisable to make it memorable. We tried to figure out 2 colloquial, language agnostic and easy to spell words that can be used together for a catchy name. Some of the words that made our list included Chai, Share, Time, Like, Fun, Free, Chat etc. Post this we narrowed down to ChaiTime and ShareChat. ShareChat seemed like a more generic and mass appeal name, under which we can experiment and hone our product in any direction the audience needs and hence, the name, “ShareChat”.
And eventually, sharing and chatting became the most significant user behaviours and we never had to rename our product.

How do we see Social Media?

We believe Social media is a platform to express one’s opinions and interests and make it available to interested consumers. It is rapidly changing the fabric of our society, allowing people to surpass the human barriers of communication. One way transmission of information is becoming a thing of the past and intelligence sharing have never been easier. For an average social media user, unaware of gigantic tech innovations involved behind the concept, it’s a comfortable space which assures the presence of similar minded people across the world.

Currently we are….

Started by three graduates from IIT Kanpur, Farid Ahsan, Ankush Sachdeva and Bhanu Singh in 2014 and have fast grown into a diverse team of 60 individuals. With an average age of 25 years, our team comes from 18 different states and speaks 15 Indian languages.

Since ShareChat’s launch in October, 2015, we have grown to become one of the biggest vernacular social network. Today, more than 11 million active users across 10 languages generate 10 million posts, 206 million shares and more than 15 billion impressions per month.

Our biggest challenge was..

Our biggest challenge was to prove the need of a product like ShareChat in India, when multiple social media products were already present on a huge scale. Our partners, the investor community and sometimes even our team members questioned the requirement of an exclusive product for the upcoming internet users. Fortunately today our numbers and virality speak for itself, but it was surely not the case when we started.

We want to dominate the world by..

We want ShareChat to become a product suitable for every Indian who wants to consume social media in their local language. Once we are able to deliver the power of social media to every Indian, we will expand our presence in emerging markets. We want to become the product of choice for every individual who wants to consume social media in their own language.

We’re making moolah by…

We believe monetization is a function of our scale and engagement of our product among the users. Though native advertising has always been an attractive option, we have restrained ourselves from getting into monetization and focused on improving our product and tech infrastructure. Also we are lucky to have passionate and radical minded investors who double down our belief in making a world class product accessible to millions of users which can define the future of internet.

Our What The **** Moment

Our WTF moment was also our eureka moment. Before coming up with the complete idea of ShareChat, we ran some experiments to understand the behavior of our target users in Whatsapp groups. Using a Facebook we asked people to drop their contact numbers in comments section to get added in a WhatsApp group for “Sachin Tendulkar fans”. Much to our surprise, within an hour we had more than 2000 comments with personal contact numbers, requesting to be added in the group. We were astonished by the response which in turn strengthened our faith in making ShareChat.

Industry as we foresee

We believe social media evolution in India has seen two phases. First was the incoming of Social Media as a concept which established international networks like Orkut and Facebook. The same audience steadily migrated to Instagram and SnapChat.

The second phase, which kicked off 3-4 years ago, witnessed the incoming of second generation of internet. Availability of affordable smartphones and decreased data cost enabled the spread of internet and social media into a much deeper demographic. This second generation is expected to be much larger in number than the first one and thus will dominate in defining the future of Indian internet. We believe the Indian internet industry will include unique products with varied use-cases and it won’t follow the footsteps of western internet phenomenon. With 9 out of 10 first time internets users in India consuming local language content, we at Sharechat believe that we are building a vernacular-first social media audience on our platform.

Lastly, Are you hiring?

Yes, we are hiring. We are in a rapid growth phase in terms of our user base. We need highly skilled developers to sustain the tech infrastructural requirements with the growth we are observing. Also, our machine learning and AI team will play a crucial role in the coming year, solving the diverse problems of “Bharat” using tech. Thus we look forward to increase our bandwidth in the machine learning and AI team.